I'm not sure how many of you subscribe to this magazine, but I just wanted to give "props" to it for being a quality publication. It's not a fly fishing magazine, but they always have a few good fly fishing articles as well as a pattern in it. For someone like me who kayak fishes, fishes for warmwater species as well as trout, it is well worth the annual subscription ($12). It's only published bi-monthly, but I anxiously await each edition. I used to subscribe to some of the other fly fishing magazines, but found it hard pressed to justify the cost/benefit. This is one magazine I feel I get my money's worth.

It's top notch, there is something of value in every issue be it a fly tying pictorial or a review of a State Park or an article on catfishing. It's been my most valuable resource on Pennsylvania fishing ever since I was a kid, and that's a pretty long time.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Posted on: 2012/2/25 8:44

_________________
"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel, and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land. Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all down as the progress of man."

I subscribed to the angler for many years, and always looked forward to it's monthly arrival.However, when they combined it with the boating magazine, and cut it down to a bi-monthly, I let my subscription lapseIt just didn't seem to have many flyfishng articles anymore, and I really didn't have much interest in what was in it.

Last I knew, charlie meck was writing a fly tying piece for it. Is he still doing that?

Charles Meck and Carl Haensel usually do the pattern article. This month's magazine has a bunch of other fly fishing-related articles in it. Over the past few years, I can only recall ever seeing one or two article on watercraft topics (powerboat). I don't know what it used to be like years ago, so can't comment on whether it has declined as far as fly fishing articles go. I'd be curious to see what the subscription breakdown by angler type looks like (bait, fly, etc.). I wouldn't think that many people who are strictly boaters would subscribe to it.

I remember reading it in our school's library. Doubt any schools have it any more. I remember a great article on Penns called something like "Penns, Wild, Clean, and Free". Also, one on the upper Tully. Would love to spend a day reading though old ones!

"Back in the day", there would typically be several fly fishing pieces in every monthy issue. Posters on this site rrt and rleep wrote some good stuff for it. Hard to believe, but rrt actually ratted on a few streams then. Before he saw the light I guess

And the treasure trove (IMHO) is every issue since 1930, available here. Also, each issue is searchable, so they must have done some rudimentary OCR on the documents; they're not just plain scans, which makes them even more useful.

Reading through some back issues, an angler creel survey on one stream I fish tallied almost 3000 wild trout harvested!!! And I think I'm doing well at catching 50 trout a day out of the stream!

Posted on: 2012/2/25 9:54

Edited by salmonoid on 2012/2/25 10:22:24Edited by salmonoid on 2012/2/25 10:26:56

rrt wrote:Still a good general fishing magazine, IMO, though almost all articles come from the same group of about 10-12 writers. (I pm'ed DFG about what he said about me.)

rrt,

My brother (and I, to a lesser degree) talked about submitting an article. However, he had heard what you described; that there was an inside group of a few writers who actually got published. Do you have any insight into the inner workings of publication there or has it changed since the days when you wrote articles for it?

Back in the '80's I think, the angler ran a "county features" series of articles. It featured a few counties in each issue, and talked about the best fishing opportunities in each one. And must have ran for several years I believe. These pieces were written by local WCCs and writers who were quite familiar with the waters in that area.rrt explained to me that he was asked to do the piece for blair county, and agreed to do so rather reluctantly. And it was the only time he did such a thing.So I apologize to him for my possibly misleading post about what he wrote then. It was quite a while ago for sure.